Loyalty, incentive or reward programs are typically used as a form of highly customizable and targeted marketing. A loyalty program provider often attracts customers who sign-up for a loyalty program. Shopping benefits such as discounts are offered to the customers by the provider. The provider then markets to merchants that the provider can bring customers to the merchant. For example, a loyalty program provider may approach a merchant (e.g., the clothing retailer GAP® Inc.) with an offer to bring customers to the GAP® in exchange for a fee. The provider would then send a solicitation (via email or regular mail) to its customers offering, for example, a 10% discount coupon that may be redeemed at the GAP® on a particular day. The success of the solicitation can be assessed based on the number of coupons redeemed.
In such a loyalty solicitation, the merchant would usually pay the loyalty program provider a percentage of the sales (e.g., 10%) that result from the solicitation. The merchant benefits from the increased sales. The loyalty program provider benefits from the commission that it receives, and the customers benefit from the received discount.
There are several areas that could be improved in such traditional loyalty programs. For example, such traditional programs suffer from leakage. Leakage occurs when the merchant does not fully report sales resulting from the solicitation. Leakage results in loss revenues for the loyalty program provider. Further, administrative marketing programs such as coupon redemption is costly. For example, setting up and maintaining offers, eligibility criteria, redemption criteria, reporting criteria and other functions of a promotion system traditionally requires business analysts of the reward program platform provider to manually configure the platform. What is needed is a marketing and promotions platform that enables intelligent, automated (e.g., via application programming interfaces) interfaces with a reward platform.